Blog Post

Some months ago I got a call from Miguel Angel Chiarri, a valencian architect who had seen our work at our web page and our facebook site. He explained to me, on a cautious way, he had an assignment of a customer for whom he had done an enlargement and renovation project of his dwelling which entailed the demolition of its swimming-pool and the construction of a new one. He explained that he contacted us because he thought that our work looked interesting. He came to Javea, we met at the house and he explained to us in detail what the intervention consisted of. It consisted of the demolition of a swimming-pool with pathologies and the construction of a bigger one at he same location, with a beach for children. The family was growing and they needed a bigger swimming-pool with more space for the children. At the same time they took the opportunity to solve their water loss problem. The following weeks after his visit we exchanged plenty of mails and we prepared an estimate which they considered fair and adapted to their needs. And we got down to work.

We started the demolition works and we found a surprise. Under the first pool shell we were demolishing was another pool shell. So we were demolishing two superimposed pools. We concluded that the original pool of the house had some kind of problem they were not able to solve. Surely it lost water due to some kind of crack and as they could not solve the problem they built a new swimming-pool inside the old one. The first consequence was that the size of the second pool had been reduced comparing to the size of the first one.

Immediately we noticed that we would build the third swimming-pool. According to the cadastral number of the house, the original dwelling dated from the early 70’s. In 40 years two swimming-pool shells had been built. And we were starting to build the third one. Roughly we calculated that each of them had a life span of 20 years. Very little time… This data should invite us to reflection. What did they do wrong? Or, did they do anything right?

We started digging through the debris the backhoe was creating and we draw our own conclusions. The first pool (possibly built at the 70’s) had quite no reinforcements. It was built with filled blocks on a very lean concrete slab which almost broke up while looking at it. In the second and more recent one we found reinforcements which seemed well distributed so we thought the leak could be in the installations. This has been confirmed later on by the owner.

At this point, where the demolition is finished and the formwork is already reinforced, we will proceed with the construction of the third pool and, hopefully, the final one. During the coming days I will provide a detailed explanation about how we will proceed.